Joomla

Joomla ( ), also styled Joomla! (with an exclamation mark) and sometimes abbreviated as J!, is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content on websites. Web content applications include discussion forums, photo galleries, e-Commerce and user communities, and numerous other web-based applications. Joomla is developed by a community of volunteers supported with the legal, organisational and financial resources of Open Source Matters, Inc. Joomla is written in PHP, uses object-oriented programming techniques and simple software design patterns, and stores data in a Structured Query Language (MySQL/MariaDB) database. Joomla includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, blogs, search, and support for language internationalisation. It is built on a model–view–controller web application framework that can be used independently of the CMS. Among CMSes, Joomla ranks fifth or sixth in global market share.

Developers

Joomla is maintained as an open-source project by a community of volunteers and licensed under the GNU General Public License without any warranty of any kind, including implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. The source code of Joomla is maintained on GitHub. The top three most popular public forums for discussing Joomla and seeking technical advice are The Joomla Forum™, Joomla on Stack Exchange and Mattermost.

Development lifecycle

Joomla adopted a new development strategy with the introduction of 1.6. The basic idea was to facilitate a continuous publication of Standard Support Release (SSR) intended to ensure that user requests were incorporated into the Joomla core more quickly and stabilised for the benefit of future releases. Many users were critical of the rapid change between major releases, especially when complex applications had been independently developed for a Joomla website and the website owner had to update the core in order to receive current security updates. In April 2014 the developers announced that the previous system consisting of different LTR (Long Term Release) and STR (Short Term Release) version rails would be abandoned in favour of a linear version cycle. The first release after this change was version 3.3.1. In April 2025, the Joomla! Project announced that major releases would occur at two-yearly intervals.

Security

Joomla installations are repeatedly the target of attacks, especially in the form of so-called defacements, but probably no more so when compared to other websites on the internet. Third-party extensions can add additional security risks that may be exploited by malicious actors: a list of vulnerable extensions is maintained on an ad hoc basis. While programming-related security flaws occur, the majority of security issues arise from people failing to perform regular maintenance as opposed to the intentional exploitation by the malicious actions of others. Joomla addresses reported security concerns through its Security Strike Team.

General

The Joomla project manages its activities (e.g. trademarking, licensing, marketing, software development, documentation, media releases, etc.) through dedicated teams under the umbrella of Open Source Matters, Inc. Membership of these teams is voluntary but admission is tightly controlled. Only approved team members are allowed to elect team leaders and the members of the OSM Board. In a broad sense, the Joomla project is aligned with WordPress, Drupal and Typo3 to address their concerns with the EU Cyber Resilience Act.

Conferences

J and Beyond was an annual conference primarily catering to Joomla developers and site integrators. Hosted in Europe typically around May, it served as a key gathering for professionals involved in Joomla-related projects. The 2024 conference was cancelled owing to poor ticket sales. A number of independently managed local communities of Joomla users and developers exist around the world—referred to as Joomla User Groups [JUGs]—to share news, assist people with problems and organise events. Some of these groups obtain financial support and sponsorship from OSM to conduct events known as JoomlaDays.

Financial support

Joomla is primarily funded by private sponsorships that offset OSM's operational costs; these costs include taxes, accounting, presence at ground events, operation of domains, and so forth. The project receives the rest of its revenue from website advertising, commissions, examination fees, and Google Summer of Code.

Extensions

Independently of the Joomla development team, other people have created additional software—collectively called extensions—to extend the range of applications that Joomla website owners may require. As with all third-party software products—some of which may be offered free-of-charge or licensed under conditions that may vary from the core Joomla CMS—there can be further complications (e.g incompatibility with higher versions of Joomla). Extensions that were developed for older versions of the Joomla CMS are often a reason why website owners are unable to upgrade their existing CMS to a higher version. The Joomla project does not endorse or recommend extensions created independently of the CMS development team nor does it offer any support for problems that may arise through the use of these products. There are about 5,000 third-party extensions listed in the Joomla! Extensions Directory.

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